2006.06.01 18:31 "[Tiff] Re: Tiff Digest, Vol 25, Issue 1", by Glenn Widener

Forgive the slightly offtopic question, but I know that many people on the list are involved in compression and I need some help. As you may know, there is now a JBIG2 open source encoder available (for arithmetic encoding) which looks promising:

http://www.imperialviolet.org/jbig2.html

I would like to use the software to create and distribute jbig2 compressed data in PDF files for the non-profit project I work on. Am I correct in saying that even as a user I need to worry about obtaining the proper licenses from IBM and Mitsubishi just so I can use the encoder? The only info on JBIG2 patents I found is here:

http://www.jpeg.org/jbig/faq.phtml?action=show_answer&question_id=q3f042a7298c94

And what exactly are the patents in question?

I don't think it's off-topic in the least. I think it's high time to break the PDF monopoly on useful JBIG/2 formats, and add JBIG/2 to TIFF!

We are currently evaluating the "imperialviolet" JBIG2 code, and it looks pretty good. It's licensing is fully open-source, so a melding of it with libtiff seems like a very good idea to me.

I'm sending off my patent license request today, based on the reference you cited above. It would seem that only the coding, not the decoding (reading) requires a license, but I'm not sure on that. I don't yet know what the patent numbers are, though someone else recently reported to the list that they had succeeded in getting licenses after 6 months, so they should have the patent numbers.

--
Glenn Widener
SwiftView Tools Product Manager

SwiftView Inc. - quality PCL portable document tools and services www.swiftview.com

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